Data Science Workshop

We meet to learn more about data science and machine learning by exploring Kaggle competitions.

Kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com) is a platform for predictive modelling and analytics competitions in which statisticians and data miners compete to produce the best models for predicting and describing the datasets uploaded by companies and users.

The competition we are going to discuss is TGS Salt Identification Challenge.
https://www.kaggle.com/c/tgs-salt-identification-challenge

Several areas of Earth with large accumulations of oil and gas also have huge deposits of salt below the surface.

But unfortunately, knowing where large salt deposits are precisely is very difficult. Professional seismic imaging still requires expert human interpretation of salt bodies. This leads to very subjective, highly variable renderings. More alarmingly, it leads to potentially dangerous situations for oil and gas company drillers.

To create the most accurate seismic images and 3D renderings, TGS (the world’s leading geoscience data company) is hoping Kaggle’s machine learning community will be able to build an algorithm that automatically and accurately identifies if a subsurface target is salt or not.

What is required:

• Laptop (and charger)
• Gmail account

As we will be using Google Colaboratory, no Python packages installation is required.

Google Colaboratory is a free cloud service hosted by Google to encourage Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence research. It provides Python 2.7 and 3.6 support, and also a free GPU acceleration (Tesla K80 GPU).

References:
https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/welcome.ipynb